Pilot's Life and Crash Pose Questions

By ELIZABETH OLSON

Published: April 20, 2002

GENEVA, April 19—
Sharply contradictory accounts of the life of Luigi Fasulo emerged today from family, friends and other pilots, one day after a small plane he was piloting smashed into the tallest building in Milan, killing three people, including Mr. Fasulo.

One son, Marco, a former pilot for Crossair, the former Swiss regional airline, was quoted by the Rome newspaper La Repubblica as saying his father could have taken his own life in despair over financial problems. ''It was a suicide, a suicide, do you understand?'' the newspaper quoted him as saying.

But others who knew him challenged accounts that the 67-year-old Mr. Fasulo had deliberately plowed into the 30-story building. Neither his wife nor his two sons answered their telephones today, but a family friend said Marco Fasulo had denied that he said his father committed suicide.

Some fellow pilots speculated that he may have been trying to fix defective landing gear, or that he might have fallen ill, and that the crash was a horrible accident.

Stefano Scossa, 37, who has known Mr. Fasulo, a friend of his father's, all his life, said Mr. Fasulo was a ''quiet person, and very positive.'' ''And he had a good sense of humor,'' Mr. Scossa, an airplane mechanic, said in a telephone interview from Locarno, Switzerland.

He and his father, Pino, had flown with Mr. Fasulo, on various trips to Italy and Yugoslavia. ''I always felt very safe,'' Mr. Scossa said. ''He was very competent.''

Mr. Fasulo's nephew, also named Luigi Fasulo, told Italian state television that the crash was not deliberate. ''Surely there was no intention on the part of my uncle to crash into the building,'' he said. ''He was a person who loved life.''

Those statements contrasted with accounts from other fellow fliers, including Luca Pedrolini, a flight instructor who knew him, who was quoted in La Repubblica as describing Mr. Fasulo as a ''flight cowboy.'' Those fliers said he did not follow procedures strictly, and they cited a 1983 incident in which he ran out of fuel and had a harrowing landing at the Zurich airport.

He and two passengers walked away without injury on that occasion. While he paid a modest fine, the accident was not considered grave, said Hans Aebersold, a top official at the Swiss Federal Office of Civil Aviation in Bern. ''He was very lucky, and only hit some runway lights,'' he said.

Mr. Fasulo flew small planes for more than 30 years. He was born in Avellino, near Naples, and had kept his Italian citizenship though his family moved to Ticino, in southern Switzerland, when he was 10. As an adult, he settled in the southern Swiss city of Pregassona, where he slowly built what Italian newspapers described as ''his fortune.''

Accounts diverge on Mr. Fasulo's career. The daily Corriere della Sera said he had been working for Avio Service and a corporation called Eurotex, based in Panama, and earned enough to buy a villa on scenic Lake Como.

Mr. Scossa painted a more modest picture, saying Mr. Fasulo sold and repaired pinball and automated slot machines and sometimes sold land or houses. He said Mr. Fasulo did not drive expensive cars, and ''did not give the impression of caring about things, or showing off.''

According to Corriere della Sera, only a few hours before Mr. Fasulo took off on Thursday evening, he went to the local police station in Como to report that 140,000 euros, about $123,000, had disappeared from one of his bank accounts.

While Italian police were cooperating with the Ticino prosecutor's office, friends and family continued to puzzle over what had happened.

''Maybe he was distracted with the landing gear, or maybe he felt ill,'' Mr. Scossa said. ''Of course, he was of a certain age.''

Once they turn 50, Switzerland's 6,800 private pilots licensed to fly single-engine planes have to be medically certified annually to continue to fly. The federal aviation authority said Mr. Fasulo had passed an examination again last October, but a niece said in an newspaper interview that he suffered from high blood pressure, and might have had a heart attack.

Mr. Fasulo's wife, Filomena, told the daily La Stampa that her husband was an expert pilot who regularly made the 20-minute flight to Milan from Locarno for refueling.

Reto Frösch, who leads the single-engine section of the Aero Club of Locarno and knew Mr. Fasulo casually, said he dismissed accusations that Mr. Fasulo was reckless. ''There was no evidence he was lighthearted about flying,'' he said.

As a fellow pilot, he said his best guess was that Mr. Fasulo was trying to fix his landing gear when he reported a mechanical problem to Milan's air traffic controllers. ''He probably bent down where he couldn't see out, and forgot how fast he was flying,'' he said. ''The rest was bad luck.''

Photo: Luigi Fasulo, pilot of the plane that hit a Milan skyscraper. (EPA)